The film follows the life of Napoleon from his early life in Corsica to his death at Saint Helena. The film is notable for its use of location shooting for numerous scenes, especially at the French estates of Malmaison and Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, and sites of Napoleonic battles...
Historical film directed and written by Sacha Guitry follows the the history of Paris from its founding through the significant events in the city's history.
A film about the early part of the French Revolution, shown from the eyes of the citizens of Marseille, counts in German exile and, of course, the king Louis XVI, each showing their own small problems.
A ruined banker is abandoned by his mistress. He commits suicide after entrusting a prostitute with twenty-thousand francs. The money changes hands. A crook is arrested in the house of an an actress he had fooled. In a luxury hotel, a typist kills her lover's wife. The trial of the murderer is...
This murder mystery is set in a Parisian cafe and examines the mysterious murder of a famed journalist and extortionist who is killed at his table in the cafe. Though the prime suspects are gathered together( including his wife and her lover, the gun-runner, the creditor, and a playboy) and all of...
In a small town in Spanish Morocco, old Ricardo, who runs a café, lives with his daughter, Conchita. She believes that Ricardo is her father. In reality, he took her in at the age of eighteen months in a douar abandoned during the conquest. One day a Berber chief, Tamar, sees Conchita, tells her...
Philippe Lambert, an attractive young attaché to the Prime Minister's office, is a man of many female conquests. One of them, Madame Grandbourg, wife of a very influential man, sent him a passionate letter, which he lost at the theater. Marion, the usherette who found it, contacts him to ask him...
This is the story of a wealthy bourgeois who marries his only child, a daughter, to a penniless nobleman because he hopes to use his son-in-law to get a title. The son-in-law is a lazy, affected stereotype; but M. Poirier is also a stereotype, of the obnoxious big businessman. The poor daughter,...
Irène is the unhappy wife of a wealthy publisher, Jacques Voisin-Larive, who cares about her no more than a beautiful piece of furniture. Her meeting with Étienne, a young cabinetmaker with whom she falls in love, turns her dismal existence upside down. Not wanting to reveal her condition to her...
Out of love for an actress, Isabelle, the Baron de Sigognac joins a traveling troop en route to Paris. When an actor dies, he takes over his role: that of Captain Fracasse.
Claude is a young man whose girlfriend has just broken up with him. Feeling unable to overcome the pain, Claude has no other idea than to end his life. Back home, he finds five middle-aged or elderly men sitting at the dinner table but he refuses to join the guests and goes upstairs to his bedroom....
The adventurer Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, descendant (by the left hand) of the king of France Henri II, and who claims to be "Countess de la Motte", imagines a tortuous plan to steal a magnificent diamond necklace that the queen Marie-Antoinette refused to buy from the jewelers Boehmer and...
The forbidden romance between wealthy Giselle Preville and impoverished journalist Claude Dauphin. When Preville disappears, Dauphin is accused of kidnapping by the girl's snobbish father Rene Alexander. By the time the Normandie reaches New York, however, the "mystery" is solved and all...
French silent film pioneer Abel Gance directs this 1935 classic about Lucrezia Borgia, her brother, Cesare. and her father, Pope Alexander VI -- one of history's most ruthless and ambitious crime families.
Young and handsome Armand Duval falls in love with Marguerite Gautier, a 'demi-mondaine'. He manages to persuade her to give up her life as a courtesan and they both settle down in the country. Tthe beginning of their idyll is like a dream but a short-lived one as their relationship is considered...
At the urging of her childhood friend Brémontier, Lucie de Kéradec, a wealthy widowed countess who wishes to remarry, invites all of her seven suitors to her mansion. Her untold intention is to test them by claiming to be ruined. The experience is a success in that each of the potential husbands...
The film is a 125-minute, black-and-white biography of French priest and diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), who served for 50 years under five different French regimes: the Absolute Monarchy, the Revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the Constitutional Monarchy....